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The Question of Participation: Urban Interstitial Production As It Responds to the Olympic Machine

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The Question of Participation: Urban Interstitial Production As It Responds to the Olympic Machine The Question of Participation: Urban Interstitial Production as it Responds to the Olympic Machine Margit Neuhold 33102248 Dissertation MA Contemporary Art Theory 2008/09 Department of Visual Cultures Goldsmiths University of London Thanks to: Andy Lowe Gill Brown Orianna Cacchione Sole Garcia Marianne Mulvey Martin Slavin Carolyn Smiths Thomas Pausz Hilary Powell The Question of Participation: Urban Interstitial Production as it Responds to the Olympic Machine Introduction....................................................................................... 2 1.1. Modes of Participation................................................................. 8 1.2 Transformations shaping the contemporary city ......................... 12 1.2.1. EXCURSUS: URBAN PUBLIC(S) AND THEIR SPHERE(S) ................................................... 15 1.3. The Olympic Spirit ..................................................................... 18 1.4. The Olympic Machine ................................................................ 22 1.4.1. WINNING THE BID........................................................................................................... 25 1.4.2. MOBILIZING JUDICIARY POWER ...................................................................................... 27 1.4.3. IN SEARCH FOR A LEGACY .............................................................................................. 29 1.4.4. EXCURSUS: EXERCISING URBAN SOCIAL CONTROL......................................................... 32 1.4.5. EXCURSUS: UNRAVELLING THE COMMUNITY MYTH....................................................... 35 1.4.6. MAINTAINING PUBLIC ORDER ........................................................................................ 37 2. 1. The Micropolitics of the Interstices........................................... 41 2.2. Manual to the Rhizomatic Appendix .......................................... 45 2.2.1. EXCURSUS: SOCIAL FORMATIONS ................................................................................... 48 2.3. Undoing the Fence..................................................................... 51 2.4. Transsectoral practices ............................................................. 54 2.4.1. CONCATENATION OF ART AND ACTIVISM ........................................................................ 55 2.4.2 PSYCHOGEOGRAPHICAL PRODUCTION............................................................................... 58 2.4.3. BUILDING FUTURE MEMORIES......................................................................................... 60 Appendix TIMELINE E-MAIL RHIZOMATIC APPENDIX ........................................................................................................... 63 Bibliography …………………………………………………………….………….. 74 Introduction The subject of investigation will be the Olympic Games 2012 in the framework of the contemporary city. Investigating the Games’ history from World War II onwards, since 1948 there have been no announced Games which did not take place. Any resistance to stop the powerful Olympic machine after winning the bid has been proven pointless. Instead the Games call for participation on a variety of levels, from the state apparatus, corporations, institutions and people through all social strata: workforce, volunteers, athletes, children, visitors and a global audience. Hence to me it seems that the most important question to raise is the one of participation. Since the decision was made for London to host the Olympic Games the question of its legitimisation needs to be addressed. In a social democratic structure it is thought that citizens hold the power and the political ground functions through an ethos of participation. The relation between the governing and the governed operate on the governmental interface of participation. Various platforms require participation: e.g. referendum, platforms of codeterminations, citizens’ groups, and consultations. Through participation the democratic system functions, legitimises and concurrently sets up different relationships of power. The process of implementing the Olympic Games has to go through a major consultation phase and requires the strong support of citizens. Hence, the call for participation and their responses operate on many different levels: dialogues and consultations, administration, volunteering, providing jobs and businesses, training, education, calls for ideas to contribute. There is no homogenous framework within which to participate. Participation demands positioning, and in turn offers the potential to each to be perceived within the framework and chosen position. This project understands participation as a hinge and unfolds it as a major structuring process, defining politics and its function. In search for counter-models and alternatives fostering the neoliberal and capitalist production this project approaches participation from an activist point of view. I will explore participation within certain conditions, namely the implementations of change in the contemporary city since these political embedded transformations function through participation. Yet, the concept of participation cannot be reduced to rational parameters. Therefore 2 I aim to investigate its operations and meanings for two reasons: to reveal its complexity and in turn to extract (non)systemic functions from its different agencies. At the beginning I will investigate models and means of participations on both the macro and micropolitical scale, not to punctuate their binary oppositions— ‘system compliant’ versus resistant—but to provide an understanding of their operating forces. My investigation is based on post-structural analysis and owes much to concepts and ideas by Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The first chapter investigates participatory strategies starting on a structural level, whereas the second chapter aims to emphasize the socio-political level. The first part of the project starts with the exploration of the rising significance of the contemporary city staging the Olympic Games under the current conditions of late capitalism, the rising Empire. As such compressed nodes cities compete for mega spectacles—which presupposes a precise functioning infrastructure informing a set of mechanisms operating on its social and territorial production—in an entrepreneurial mode. The urban production shifted from manufacturing goods towards meta-production: the buying of finished products, assembling them and introducing new markets, a strand of what Gilles Deleuze calls the control society. 1 Capitalism sells services and buys activities, which is exactly were the Olympic Games fits in; London will host an activity and sell services. Industrial production lost its hegemony, and production shifted towards immaterial or biopolitical production, the production of ideas, information, social relationships, affects or codes and towards affective labour in the service industry. To fully grasp the impacts of what is triggered by the Olympic Games, I briefly investigate the discourse on urban public(s) and their sphere(s). Its significance for democratic processes—which are required for the Games’ implication—unfold with Chantal Mouffe’s critique on the Habermasian model and further models on a plebeijan public sphere, counterpublics or post- publics. 1 See Gilles Deleuze. “Postscript on Control Societies.“ Negotiations, 1972-1990. European perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995: 177-182 : 181. 3 The following exploration of the emergence of the modern Olympic Games (1896) maps them as part of an early movement operating on the biopolitical level. Propaganda operated for the strength and efficacy of the body to mobilize masses and to industrialize popular health. This historical development instrumentalising and institutionalising participation by means of sports and leisure activities underlines my rational and critical approach towards the Olympic Charter stating the six ‘Fundamental Principles of Olympism’. All these sections provide the backdrop to understand the operation of the Olympic machinery. A roughly chronological investigation, starting from winning the bid in July 2005 to August 2009, will demonstrate the operations of power structures and outline its overarching machinic production ruled by a centralized powercenter. This demonstration of a systemic channeling of power— enabled through a rational functioning mode—penetrating and infiltrating the state-apparatus concurrently maps the synthesis of sovereignty and capital. This alliance embodied in the Olympic agency acts as a powerful tool overriding existing power structures, and producing a new body of agents; they concurrently become nodes, translating, transforming, and multiplying themselves. Its disciplinary mode of production has to be understood as centralized, hierarchical, monitored, and controlled. My investigation will demonstrate, that the model of its alliance between capital and nation-state continuously reproduces itself. Through a Foucauldian analysis, that demonstrates the exercise of urban social control, I will further argue that a hierarchical disciplinary society is produced within a rhizomatic control society. Utilizing the mechanism of the ‘archipelago’, the ‘disciplined normality’ penetrates the micro level but spreads further outwards. With this suggested reading of the Olympic Games’ power structure I aim to raise awareness of the complexity and the interconnectedness of the
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